Tag: Spring

Pleated, becheckered and monochrome, it’s possible to see the managed pine and the white ground between trees, galvanised in the light. Palette lakes: smooth pulped and pressed flat. You can see the ripped, trimmed and scored woods, the growths left to bloom in rings like boreal fairy glens. Summer house are still submerged. From here it’s a stickle-backed land, seeming far more cottaged and tended than from the ground. You see the farm ponds and where black heated tarmac crosses the crispy white ski tracks.

The vanguard of sea ice hugs the far coast: a barrage against liquid. The edges of the Baltic are still frozen – they hold a viscous edge that peels and retreats on warm days, crusts and extends on cold. In the shallow seas around the coast snow furs over the islets that are hugged close and made part of the land only to be released into the sea again come spring. Some of the archipelagos are linked together by stringy bridges.

Over Turku the ice loosens. There are beaches of snow in the bays, ringed islands that could almost be Greek with their white sands in bright blue. Over Sweden I watch the land start to brown, the lakes crack. There are long white scores cut out of the trees that stretch in very straight lines across miles of field, wood, frozen sea and island – presumably they are old imperial sledgeways?

Over Denmark the clouds come and I try to make out parts of the royal wedding magazine the Finnish woman next to me is reading: ‘Diana vs Kate’ – why are they so interested?

From the land of Finns to the land of Angles – we are both fished fine angles and filled lands, finished on an ask, an Ang, a Fin. The plane has taken me from winter back to spring. On the ground the foggy air smells warmly wet – long released from ice. The willows and thorns are leafing. I have gone from zero ice to liquid pools, the muds of the new year. We are quick to forget an English winter. But the Finnish winter I am fresh from will be harder to let go of. In the leech-grey wood one tree has come into green. As the train creeps into London the land warms another degree, and the sparse trees and track-side buddleia start to show it, begrudgingly.

I’m in Penbryn, Cardigan Bay and all the animals are at it: midges, ponies, birds that come in pairs, even the slugs. Swallows are back from their adventures. I came here once before, ‘tippled and toppled down the hill to the beach’ according to my mum. But it’s another discovery for me now. It’s a new pocket where the rocks are black – heaped and shattered in waves and strata that curl up to make dark looming cliffs. Where squalls have hurled themselves in briny tempests and broken up the windy shore line. And the forests are bright green and humming with the bees nosying in to the wildflowers. Kestrels hover as if hung by string above their prey. My caravan is parked in a grassy place ‘where you can lie on your back and look at the stars if you want to! No light pollution here.’ The cows are heavy with udder and calf and the hedgerows are singing. The birds even do jazz with drum wing-beats and trumpet-voices.

As beech is to bluebell, we are fed and sprung in the new weather. Human eyes and ears and skin are all happy in the green. Me and a flamboyant bird hide out in the yew bushes in Kew while children walk past in pat-a-cake pink hats, right past the party pheasant.

We have a picnic of our own in this oddly human Eden and this bird of paradise is happy amongst humans. Periwinkles light up the ground. This place was seeded by Regency botanists, trod by prince and parlour maid, planted by people with a few fair pennies. Fantasists. All of them. Dealers in the exotic. Not that I’m complaining.